Reviews and ratings are an essential component of any site or blog today. They influence the visitors in reaching a decision to buy a product or not, based on the review comments or ratings. A product with many positive reviews and rating builds trust and can lead to successful conversion.

They also help to improve the site content and tell us what exactly the customer is looking for. It is also important to provide honest unbiased reviews with pros and cons to improve the credibility of your online store. WordPress users can choose from a big list of free or premium plugins with a rich set of features.

Also it is better to choose those review plugins for WordPress which supports rich snippets. Google likes and supports schema.org and so ideally every review site should ensure that its reviews are marked up as per the review schema .If the reviews are marked up correctly then Google will show your listing in its search results with the rating, will make it stand out and help you to rank better in a search engine and also it will increase your CTR (Click Through Rate).

We review some of the best WordPress review plugins and rating plugins, which you can use to add lovely reviews to your site and ratings for your products or articles!.

WP Review Plugin

WP Review plugin is a great WordPress review plugin from Mythemeshop which is available as free and pro versions. It is highly customizable and we can create reviews, using stars, percentage or point rating; besides that, it goes with any theme, its values are adjusted for mobile and tablet devices and it also includes support for translation, Google rich snippets and unlimited colors.

The main features of the plugin include:

• Multi rating systems like stars, circles, percentages, and points.
• Supports Google rich snippets (schema.org).
• User comment rating and reviews.
• Automatic star rating on thumbnails.
• Option to change individual review colors and positions.
• Tabbed widget which show recent and popular reviews.

WP Product Review Lite

WP Product Review Lite is a free plugin from ThemeIsle developers. It comes with features like pros and cons, ratings for specific product features out of 10, possibility to insert a product thumbnail, affiliate links, colors for ratings and also user ratings can be set to impact overall rating. The plugin will also add schema markup to your review posts automatically.

Main features of the plugin include:

• It comes with the latest product widget.
• Pros and cons of products can be listed which gives a review summary.
• Rich snippet support.
• Affiliate button which you can use to add affiliate links directly.
• Ability to post user reviews.

This free plugin is one among the best WordPress review plugins, but if you want more features like 10 fields for pros and cons and grading options, preload grading options from previous posts etc, a pro version is also available for $59 with premium add-ons.

Taqyeem

This is a premium review plugin for WordPress from Codecanyon. It comes with an appealing unique style and allows the author to review a product and add their favorite criteria items to publish an honest review of the product. Taqyeem lets you insert summarized review directly into your post. You can add unlimited criteria items to the review table and change their position also. It has great SEO support for rich snippets with proper microdata and schema.

Some of the highlighted features are:

• Unlimited colors and review criteria.
• Supports post, pages and custom post types.
• Schema and rich snippet support.
• Best, recent & random reviews widgets.
• Multiple review styles like stars, points & percentage.

There is no free version but you can get this great plugin for just $22 with one year support.

WP-PostRatings

WP-PostRatings is a free plugin which offers you to paste an AJAX code of its own wherever you wish to enable the rating system. You can add this AJAX codes to posts, comments or pages (any number of them) and place it in the widget area.

The best part of this plugin is that it can show the highest rated posts and most rated posts which helps users to find the best articles of your blog. The plugin comes with a number of cool option like bars, hearts, numbers, plus-minus, classic stars, thumbs up and down and up-down arrows.

YASR Rating Plugin

Yet Another Stars Rating, or YASR for short, is a ratings plugin for WordPress.

With YASR you can make your own review or let your visitors vote. If you have a blog which review products or services, the YASR plugin allow you to insert a review box into your post and communicates the rating to the search engines, which can be displayed in the search engine results pages alongside your name and the product/service you’re reviewing.

You can also collect ratings from your users, which can be used to show an average user rating. This can be displayed in your post, and also in your rich snippets. This is very useful for local businesses, who can ask users to review their service, which can be then displayed in the search result pages.It also has features like auto insert, show overall rating in home page, stats for visitor votes and support for fractional values.

You can use the free version or upgrade to premium packages starting from $20 per year.

To Wrap Up

All these plugins featured here allow you to create an organized and consistent user rating or review system for your blog or products which will increase the views and also rank better on search engine result pages.

Are you looking for a way to monetize your blog contents? Then having a WordPress subscription plugin is the best solution. With this plugin you can create different membership levels like free trial or paid memberships. You also can restrict access to any content including posts, pages, digital products based on the membership categories.

Content dripping is another important feature of WordPress membership plugins that allows you to show restricted content to members after a certain time period instead of showing all of your contents at one go. This is very crucial for membership sites and the customer will keep coming back for regular content. We review some of the best subscriptions plugins available today.

Plugin Comparison Table

Plugin		Content Protection	Restrict Content	Free Version	Pro versions/ Price Plans
	MemberPress	Yes	Yes	No	Business -$99/ year Developer -$199/ year
	Restrict Content Pro	Yes	No	No	Personal -$49/ year Professional - $199/ year
	Paid Memberships Pro	Yes	Yes	Yes	Core - $97/year Plus- $197/year
	WP-Members	Yes	No	Yes	Site membership -$59/year
	MemberMouse	Yes	Yes	No	Starter-$19/month Advanced-$99/month

1. MemberPress

MemberPress is one of the most popular WordPress subscription plugins with an immense amount of features. MemberPress will allow you to grant and restrict access to posts, pages, categories, tags, communities and digital files based on user subscription plans. MemberPress makes it simple to setup a membership website with WordPress. It can set up pricing plans, login, account, and thank you pages for your users.

Some other top features of MemberPress include:

• Management of unlimited number of members.
• A powerful access control, which allows you to restrict access to any posts, pages, categories, tags and files.
• Selling an unlimited amount of digital products and pricing pages.
• Showing or releasing restricted content to members at certain time intervals. This is commonly used for selling online courses or learning materials.
• Accepting payments with PayPal Express Checkout and Stripe.

2. Restrict Content Pro

Restrict Content Pro is one of the best membership plugins for WordPress. With Restrict Content, you can develop a large number of subscription packages, prices, and levels. Restrict Content Pro smoothly integrates with the WordPress user interface which makes it easy to use all its features.

Major features include:

• Different membership plans like free, trial and premium subscriptions.
• Promotional coupons, sales, and discounts can be activated.
• Controlling access to whole posts, pages or just sections of pages.
• Setting expiration dates for memberships.
• Integrations with Stripe, PayPal, MailChimp, MailPoet, email manager and CSV export.

3. Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is one of best wordpress membership plugins that you can use to create different membership levels and also restrict access to the content of your WordPress site to selected users.

Main features are:

• Set up the membership levels like free, paid, or recurring subscriptions like annual, monthly, weekly and daily.
• Easy Payment Gateway Integration Stripe, Authorize.net, PayPal, braintree, 2Checkout, and cybersource.
• Flexible pricing and free trial periods for your members.
• Set access and membership levels for individual pages and posts
• Drip release content over time.

4. WP-Members

WP-Members is the original WordPress membership plugin. The plugin restricts selected WordPress content depending on membership to registered site members. WP-Members requires no modifications to your theme while remaining scalable for users who want to customize the look and feel, or want to restrict only some content.

Features are:

• Restricting posts, pages, both, or none by default.
• User login, registration, and profile integrated into your theme.
• Creating custom registration and profile fields.
• Visitors can pay for memberships using PayPal for trials and recurring membership payments also can be collected automatically.
• It lets you integrate MailChimp with your membership website.

5. MemberMouse

MemberMouse is a premium membership and e-commerce solution, which lets you create a membership site in a few minutes. MemberMouse provides a flexible platform for you to sell digital products, subscription content, software service or ship physical goods.

Other features include:

• Providing you with a pack of automated customer support tools and giving a customer the ability to update their contact details, billing address, username and password and even cancel their account.
• Affiliate tracking, engagement statistics and member activity log.
• Comprehensive member management features like order history, refund, engagement statistics, access rights, pause and cancel.
• Setting up delivery schedules for your content and time-release programs.
• Keeping your customer data always safe and secure via partnerships with PCI compliant billing vendors.
• 1-click upsells, which offer customers additional product offers they may be interested in.

To Conclude

With so many good subscription plugins available in WordPress, one can easily start offering restricted access content on their site to their subscribers. Many of them offer good features already with their free versions, which can be upgraded with premium add on options. The paid ones ensure a professional support system, so that you can focus on getting more subscribers for your site.

Choose the ideal plugin suited for your business based on the features you need, such as content dripping, course delivery, pay per view access, recurring payments and custom landing pages.

If you are a small scale business owner or a big retail shop starting an online shop for your products is very crucial in today’s always connected world. Starting an online store has become much easier with the help of a wide variety of WordPress store plugins available today. You can easily build sites that sell both digital goods and physical goods that need shipping.

We look at the 9 best WordPress plugins for your store available today. Check out which plugin is best suited for you and start building a successful online store.

1. WooCommerce

WooCommerce, built by WooThemes, is probably the most popular and widely used WordPress store plugin. With over 16 million downloads, it powers more than 37% of world’s eCommerce websites.

Packed with extensive range of free and premium add-ons, this free store plugin can turn your WordPress site into a million dollar eCommerce store. It supports various type of shipping, so you can easily sell your products worldwide.

WooCommerce features are:

• Create a highly customizable online store with hundreds of themes and extensions.
• Sell either physical and digital, affiliate and external products to customers worldwide.
• Easy inventory management, right from your dashboard.
• Built in PayPal integrations and settings for customer accounts, products, tax, shipping, and transactional emails.
• You can purchase paid extensions and themes to further enhance your store.

2. Easy Digital Downloads

If you are looking to sell only digitally downloadable products, Easy Digital Downloads allows you to do that easily. Easy Digital Downloads is built specifically to sell digital downloads so it provides a better experience for digital goods and is also a free plugin.

Main features include:

• Simplicity to add products and display them.
• There are hundreds of extensions available and add-ons for many payment gateways, platforms and services.
• It supports coupon codes, customer management, data reporting, run promotional sales, shopping cart system for purchasing multiple downloads and complete payment history.

3. Jigoshop

Jigoshop is a free, reliable, secure and robust WordPress eCommerce plugin best suited for small store owners. Jigoshop features an excellent dashboard through which you can setup and manage your web quickly. The best thing about Jigoshop is that it is one of the best WordPress shopping carts available.

Features include:

4. Shopp

Shopp is another proven WordPress shopping cart plugin to create online stores. With Shopp, you can create your own order labels and easily move orders through different order fulfillment stages, either automatically or manually.

Some of its main features are:

• Pre-installed templates and layouts.
• Supports both physical and digital product types.
• Easy integration with over 50 payment processing platforms, multiple shipping rate providers, cloud storage and tax services.
• Built in security and also SEO compatibility.

The basic plugin is free and you can go for premium version with support starting from $75 per year.

5. Cart66

Cart66 is a lightweight, secure and highly efficient eCommerce plugin for creating a “PCI compliant” WordPress store. You can easily sell digital as well as physical products with it. It has multiple shipping and currency options, so it can also help you can make your business international. You can easily place advertisements and affiliate links for generating more income.

Cart66 provides a complete set of eCommerce tools.

Below are its main features:

• Multiple shipping and currency options and built-in support for more than 100 payment gateways.
• Cart66 is the only plugin that makes your site secure and PCI compliant so you don’t require own SSL certificate.
• Inventory management, google analytics, automatic creation of product pages, built in product catalog and image gallery for products.

Cart66 comes with a basic pricing plan of $99 a year and also gives a 14 day free trial.

6. WP eCommerce Plugin

WP eCommerce is a very popular free WordPress shopping cart in the market now. It can sell physical inventory, digital downloads, memberships and has a streamlined checkout process that greatly increases your store’s conversion rate.

Prominent features include:

• Support for various shipping methods and popular courier services.
• Digital downloads, physical products and membership sites are supported.
• Integration with dozens of different payment gateways.
• WP e-commerce has very good automatic tax management systems.
• Inventory, coupon, marketing, reporting management .

7. Shopify

Shopify is a fast growing eCommerce platform that handles everything for you. With Shopify WordPress Shopping Cart plugin, you can integrate a shopping cart even for a single product, so it’s perfect for small site owners looking for a simple way to sell directly to their audience.

Features include:

• Supporting Both Digital and Physical Goods.
• Inventory editor, bulk importer and order tracker for efficient inventory management.
• Accepting Apple Pay, Android Pay, and credit card payments. Their shipping system streamlines your fulfillment process with direct integration with major providers.
• Integrating with major social media platforms, such as Facebook store, twitter or Pinterest.
• Selling your products and accepting any payment on any device (Shopify POS), while Shopify updates your inventory, orders and customers in real-time.

Shopify offers a 14 day free trial and basic plans start at $29 per month.

8. MarketPress

MarketPress is easily among the best shopping cart for WordPress, known for its wide range of built in features and powerful configuration. You can create multiple colors, sizes and materials for any of your products with product images to match and make your shop look visually appealing. This feature is useful to add a product catalog to your online store for new arrivals.

Features include:

• Selling digital and physical products.
• Not allowing specific people to make purchases.
• Choosing the countries where online store is visible, making it a popular choice for selling physical goods worldwide.
• Accepting payments using popular processors, like Stripe, PayPal and Authorize.

The premium plugin comes as a part of WPMU DEV ( Premium site with over 100 plugins and support) membership starting around $99 a month.

9. Ecwid

The primary feature is that you can take an existing site and quickly integrate with its solutions. Another nice feature is the syncing between multiple devices. You can sell your products globally with multi-currency support, more than 40 international payment options, real-time shipping integration and support of 50 languages.

Important features include:

• Automatic Shipping and Taxes

• Sell simultaneously on websites, mobile phones, social sites and marketplaces.
• Add your online store to Facebook, and it will automatically update the inventory and customers between your site and Facebook stores.
• Ecwid Shopping Cart provides free mobile applications to manage your store and sell on the go. With this mobile application you can easily scan products, manage sales, track inventory and accept payments using your mobile device as a POS (Point of Sale) station.
• PCI certified, which is the safest standard for eCommerce solutions worldwide.

The basic plugin is free with premium plans starting at $15 a month.

To Wrap Up

You can choose from any of these top store plugins to start selling your products online. Some of them are free with premium add-ons, while others give a good platform with more security features at a price.

WordPress, since its release in 2003, has grown to be the most popular and versatile website solution in the world, with more than 26% of the top 10 million sites powered by it.

With an ever-growing online presence and consumer interactions powered by the data and smartphone revolutions, a properly designed and maintained site or blog is a great source of income. One of the reasons for the popularity of WordPress is due to its vast array of high quality customizable plugins designed to satisfy the needs of the modern business websites.

Users can select from a number of WordPress plugins to suit their site requirements. We have compiled a list with some of the best WordPress plugins which you can use to build a truly professional website to boost your online business and please your visitors.

The plugins can vastly improve your experience of your WordPress website and will help you to improve visitor engagement and retention.

Plugin Features Table

Plugin		Function	Total Downloads	Free Version	Pro Versions / Price Plans
	Akismet	Spam Protection	42 million +	Yes	Plus-$5 / month Backup-$9 / month Enterprise-$50 / month
	Yoast SEO	SEO	32 million +	Yes	Premium-$69/ year/site
	W3 Total Cache	Caching	5 million +	Yes	Premium Services from $100
	Wordfence Security	Security	17 million +	Yes	Premium - $99/key/year Premium - $60/5 keys/year
	Contact from 7	Contact Form	33 million +	Yes	Free
	Jetpack	Toolbox	21 million +	Yes	Premium -$99/site/year Professional -$299/3sites/year
	Google Analytics	Traffic Reports	10 million +	14 Day Free Trial	Ecommerce add-on-$49/year MonsterInsights Pro-$89/year
	Updraft Plus	Site Backup	5 million +	Yes	Personal-$70/year Business-$95/year Developer-$145/year
	MailChimp	Newsletter	12 million +	Yes	Growing Business-$10/month Pro Marketer-$199/month
	Thrive Landing Pages	Landing Page	30000 +	No	Single site -$67 one time Unlimited sites -$97 one time

1. Akismet

Akismet is the best anti-spam service for WordPress. It is the most popular and is among the best WordPress plugins with over 35 million downloads.

Akismet verifies your sites’ comments against the Akismet Web service to check if it is spam or not and lets you review the spam content it identifies under "Comments" section.

Main features of Akismet are:

• Automatic checking for all comments and filters out the spam comments.
• Compiling a status history for every comment, so that the moderator can see which comments were identified or cleared by Akismet.
• Allowing moderators to see the number of approved comments for each user.
• Saving you disk space and also speeding up your site by directly blocking the worst spam.
• Integration with top WordPress plugins, such as Jetpack and Contact Form 7.

2. Yoast SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plays an essential role in the ranking of your site in search engine page results. So it is essential to have your site SEO optimized from the beginning itself. Yoast SEO is the best SEO plugin for WordPress and helps you optimize page content, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, images and real time page analysis. It can even get you verified google authorship for your site.

Yoast SEO features include:

• Adding and optimizing custom post titles and meta descriptions using snippet editor functionality.
• Analysis, canonical and breadcrumbs support, and other SEO features.
• Notifying search engines automatically once your content is published.
• Creating XML sitemaps which has image support also.
• Easy editing of your robots.txt and .htaccess

3. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is one of the top plugins for WordPress. A faster loading site is crucial in keeping the visitors engaged on a site and if the speed at which the site content and images load is noticeably slow, it can affect your business as well as site SEO.

Page caching is used to avoid the delay by creating static cache pages for each page so that there is no need to dynamically load the contents each time.

W3 Total Cache is the best WordPress plugin on the market for caching. W3 Total Cache enables caching on your website and static resources such as theme files and configuration files are compressed and loaded faster than usual, providing you the necessary speed for better user experience.

Some of its features are:

• Improving overall site performance by 10 times
• Reducing page load time thereby increasing visitor time on site and also visitors can view more pages as a result.
• Compatibility with shared hosting and virtual private dedicated servers.
• Concise content delivery network (CDN) management with media Library and WordPress.
• Caching of pages and posts in memory or on disk.

4. Wordfence Security

This premium WordPress plugin gives you enterprise-level security. It offers two-factor authentication with a mobile login, integrity checking and real-time blocking of known attackers. It is the most downloaded WordPress security plugin. The live traffic view gives you real time traffic and hack attempts on your website.

Wordfence Security features are:

• Real-time blocking of known attackers. It uses real time data of attackers from other sites using Wordfence, to automatically protect your site.
• Web firewall that prevents you from getting hacked by identifying malicious traffic, blocking the attackers before they can access your site.
• Two-factor authentication which combines your password and verification key on your mobile to improve login security.
• Blocking fake Google crawlers and separating page views generated by crawlers from humans.
• Viewing and repairing your corrupted theme, plugin and core files with source code verification feature.

There's both a free and a premium version of the plugin; and both free and paid plugins offer complete firewall, blocking of brute-force attacks, backdoor vulnerabilities, malware, and technical support.

5. Contact Form 7

Contact forms provide a neat, clean, and simple to use interface that enables your site’s viewership to contact you and is a must for professional websites.

Contact Form 7 is easily the most popular contact form plugin in WordPress with over 30 million downloads. It is totally free and you can install it easily in any number of sites. If you are planning to create a basic contact form, then this plugin is the right choice.

The important features are:

6. Jetpack

Jetpack is one of the best WordPress plugins for blogs, providing a wide variety of features like visitor and site analytics, security services, site management, social network sharing and engagement tools.

Below are some of the cool features of this versatile plugin:

• It provides traffic details such as visit numbers and helps you get more traffic with tools like related posts and social network sharing.
• Jetpack protects against brute force attacks, unauthorized logins and also monitor your site for downtime and keep the plugins updated.
• Jetpack optimizes and speeds up image loading using the global WordPress content delivery network. This saves you hosting costs by reducing bandwidth.
• With Jetpack comes a centralized dashboard. You can easily manage the plugins and menus, publish posts, and view complete site statistics.
• Jetpack includes other features that help you customize your site including contact forms, galleries, notifications, subscriptions and configurable widgets.

7. Social Warfare

Social Warfare can add impressive social sharing buttons to your website, with a wide selection of button designs and positioning options to select from.

Social Warfare also allow you to create custom content for each of the most popular social networks, which can be used whenever one of your posts gets shared on Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus and LinkedIn. You can upload images for each post on your site, specifically for using in content that gets shared.

Features of Social Warfare for WordPress:

• Attractive and customizable buttons supporting up to 10 popular social media platforms.
• Displays the total social share counts for each button.
• You can specify a unique tweet message that can be shared on Twitter.
• Great performance and optimized for mobile devices.
• Ability to show the number of tweet counts.

8. Updraft Plus

If you are running a commercial site or simple blog, it is essential to take backups of the complete site to minimize loss in case of site attack or crash. Updraft Plus is amongst WordPress best plugins for site backup.

You can manually create backups of your complete website or you can schedule backups to be created at specific time intervals. It also allows you to create off-site backups by storing the backups on Google Drive, Dropbox and other options. This means that, if your site gets attacked, your backup won’t be touched.

Its features are:

• Completing file and database backups or customizing the files to backup.
• Scheduling of automatic backups.
• Multiple offsite storage options like the Updraft Plus Vault, Amazon S3, Dropbox and Google Drive.
• Downloading backup archives present on WordPress dashboard.
• Super easy one-click restore option for recovery.

9. MailChimp

A newsletter is the smartest way to stay in touch with your subscribers. It doesn’t matter what type of site you run, a newsletter can easily increase product or subscription sales and bring more visitor to the website on a regular basis. MailChimp is a popular newsletter service that allows you to send out email campaigns to a list of email subscribers.

With MailChimp, you can easily create an enticing newsletter mail and send it to all the subscribers with just one click. MailChimp is free for lists having 2,000 subscribers, which is why it is a popular choice among newsletter plugins.

Some of the MailChimp features are:

• Robust marketing automation feature to make sure your emails reach the desired list of people at the right time. You can also target visitors based on behavior, preferences, and previous sales.
• Good looking, user-friendly and mobile optimized sign-up forms. You can customize the form fields and send anything you like to MailChimp.
• Working seamlessly with some of the best plugins for WordPress like Contact Form 7, Salesforce, Eventbrite, BuddyPress, Easy Digital Downloads, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Shopify, and SurveyMonkey.
• Reporting features like sales monitoring and website activity along with revenue reports.
• Checkbox settings for visitors who leave a comment or register to your website. Also allows opting in to your email list.

10. T??hrive Landing Pages

A landing page is a standalone web page, distinct from your main website which has been designed for a single goal to convert. There are different types of landing pages like a course page, webinar page, download page etc.

Thrive Landing Pages is the best WordPress landing page plugin which can create high converting landing pages for you.

Main features are:

• Over 100 landing page templates to choose from like webinar pages, sales pages & video sales pages, email sign-up, download and thank you pages.
• Simple drag and drop editor that lets you create pages quickly.
• Easy integration with any email service.
• Good collection of conversion focused elements that can be added to the landing page.
• High level of customization allowing you to create 100 % custom landing pages.

11. Google Analytics by MonsterInsights

Analytics is becoming more and more essential these days as they provide insights about visitor details, what time they visit, which are the engaging contents, bounce rate and conversion details. This data helps you to design the desired content and to improve the site business and popularity.

The Google Analytics plugin is one of the best plugins for WordPress that allows you to track your site easily and always stays up to date with the newest features.

Just add your Google tracking code and start knowing about your traffic, track demographics, and outbound links.

Some of the important features are:

• Easy tracking of your sales, downloads, user searches, outbound links, affiliate links and emails which is very useful for e-commerce sites.
• Dashboards to easily see visitor stats such as most visited pages, page view duration, visited pages etc.
• Finding where people are coming from and going to your site, through a referral detection feature.
• Showing the most popular posts, pages and website sections which can drive site and content design.
• Ability to track search results pages and 404 pages.

Conclusion

There are many more specific plugins depending on the purpose of your site.If you are looking to build an online store then check out our list of  the best store plugins.You can also easily start earning from subscriptions by adding these excellent membership plugins.

Make your site more engaging by using these best rating or review plugins that can build authenticity and also increase viewership and conversion .

Even though there are many other great plugins that have not made it into our list, we believe that these top essential plugins can get you going and achieve most out of your WordPress site.